the soulstory

the idea

"Can you entice people to be more sustainable with good design?" Georg asked himself this question after ordering T-shirts from the USA. He actually wanted to shop locally and sustainably, but the designs from the American label Threadless were simply too good.

That was in 2011, and Georg and I were studying in Vienna, well, officially anyway. I was actually mostly doing music, and Georg wanted to become a freelance Nonviolent Communication trainer. After we saw Werner Boote's film "Plastic Planet," which showed the catastrophic impact of plastic packaging on people and the environment, we were determined to stop using plastic bottles.
We only drank tap water and used old wine and vodka bottles when we were out and about, much to the amusement of friends and strangers on the subway – but that's a whole other story.

In Georg's head, the two ideas somehow came together and he tried to persuade me: "If you could print cool drinking bottles, then a lot more people would use them!"

the first prototypes

At one point, the tinkerer in me was awakened. Initially, I was attracted to the technical challenge: I wanted to know if we could pull it off. I had just lost my internship because the production company I was working for at the time hadn't survived the London riots —but that's another story.

In the basement of the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, I learned how to hand-print glass using screen printing and large ceramic kilns. I was never officially enrolled at the university.

The first soulbottles were created within a few weeks in my shared room at the time. All the designs came from friends, and they were also our first customers. After just a few weeks, we were sold out and had to produce more. Our production basically consisted of me plus a bike with a trailer. We decorated the bottles at home (often with help from flatmates or whoever else was around) and then cycled to the university, where the ovens were used to fire the color. Picking them up was more strenuous, though, as we had to cycle uphill with a full trailer. At some point, my room was so full of soulbottles drinking bottles that every time a train or car drove past the window, my whole room rattled.
Georg and I spent the next few months building soulbottles. We did (almost) everything ourselves – from the website to the accounting. It was a bit chaotic, though. But demand grew and grew, and every soulbottle sold told the story of a more sustainable and beautiful world.

founding and first series

In August 2012, after nine months of excitement and ups and downs, the company received an angel investment from entrepreneur Bernardo Saorin and was officially founded as a limited liability company. Bernardo had been looking for a plastic-free drinking bottle for his children and discovered us. With the help of his investment and a successful crowdfunding campaign, the first machine-produced soulbottles rolled off the production line in 2013...